Jaager

Based on the necessary mechanisms, to support a claim that their product can penetrate, at least part of the formulation would need to be a dye as well as larger pigment particles that intercalate with a surface polymerized binder.  In theory, it should yield a higher quality result than a semi transparent paint alone.  However, any surface coating of pigment in a binder seems like an insult to high quality wood.  Wait a tick ,,,, given the quality of the wood species provided in most mass market kits, an obscuring surface stain would be an improvement there.  

I bought the Sea Gull plans for Red Jacket and started the lofting.  The plans are 1/8" : 1'.  I loft at 1/4", but man! this is a huge ship.  The hull at the main deck is close to 250 feet long.  I do 1:60  and while anyone mad enough to build her at 1/4" would start with a 5.2 foot long hull less spars,  at 1:60 , it is
a daunting 4.2 foot beast. 
Wm Crothers' plans are still available - they are pretty detailed, but since they are drawn to support both solid hull and POF, I would not be surprised if Blue Jacket did not use Crothers as a basis for their plans.  Red Jacket has specific entries in his The American-Built Clipper Ship.
 
You will have quite a project there even at 1/8" scale, which is close to being in the miniature realm .
Wood Craft has some pretty thin veneer of Maple, Cherry and other species that scale to 1:96 OK,  so might consider planking the hull and choosing an anti-fouling paint color wood for the submerged part of the hull.  This would add additional time for the build.

I apologize for any perceived insult.  We have a lot of inexperienced modelers here and I was reflecting back to the time when I zero knowledge and did not know what I did not know.
 
Now, about your possible block species in the UK,  is the wood that makes briar pipes domestic for you?  The sections they discard because it is not burl should work.  Is there not some sort of weed hedge with really hard wood?  Any of it close to you?  Do you have any Dogwood species?  It is really dense wood.

Based on the necessary mechanisms, to support a claim that their product can penetrate, at least part of the formulation would need to be a dye as well as larger pigment particles that intercalate with a surface polymerized binder.  In theory, it should yield a higher quality result than a semi transparent paint alone.  However, any surface coating of pigment in a binder seems like an insult to high quality wood.  Wait a tick ,,,, given the quality of the wood species provided in most mass market kits, an obscuring surface stain would be an improvement there.  

Based on the necessary mechanisms, to support a claim that their product can penetrate, at least part of the formulation would need to be a dye as well as larger pigment particles that intercalate with a surface polymerized binder.  In theory, it should yield a higher quality result than a semi transparent paint alone.  However, any surface coating of pigment in a binder seems like an insult to high quality wood.  Wait a tick ,,,, given the quality of the wood species provided in most mass market kits, an obscuring surface stain would be an improvement there.  

I apologize for any perceived insult.  We have a lot of inexperienced modelers here and I was reflecting back to the time when I zero knowledge and did not know what I did not know.
 
Now, about your possible block species in the UK,  is the wood that makes briar pipes domestic for you?  The sections they discard because it is not burl should work.  Is there not some sort of weed hedge with really hard wood?  Any of it close to you?  Do you have any Dogwood species?  It is really dense wood.

I apologize for any perceived insult.  We have a lot of inexperienced modelers here and I was reflecting back to the time when I zero knowledge and did not know what I did not know.
 
Now, about your possible block species in the UK,  is the wood that makes briar pipes domestic for you?  The sections they discard because it is not burl should work.  Is there not some sort of weed hedge with really hard wood?  Any of it close to you?  Do you have any Dogwood species?  It is really dense wood.

I apologize for any perceived insult.  We have a lot of inexperienced modelers here and I was reflecting back to the time when I zero knowledge and did not know what I did not know.
 
Now, about your possible block species in the UK,  is the wood that makes briar pipes domestic for you?  The sections they discard because it is not burl should work.  Is there not some sort of weed hedge with really hard wood?  Any of it close to you?  Do you have any Dogwood species?  It is really dense wood.

I apologize for any perceived insult.  We have a lot of inexperienced modelers here and I was reflecting back to the time when I zero knowledge and did not know what I did not know.
 
Now, about your possible block species in the UK,  is the wood that makes briar pipes domestic for you?  The sections they discard because it is not burl should work.  Is there not some sort of weed hedge with really hard wood?  Any of it close to you?  Do you have any Dogwood species?  It is really dense wood.

Based on the necessary mechanisms, to support a claim that their product can penetrate, at least part of the formulation would need to be a dye as well as larger pigment particles that intercalate with a surface polymerized binder.  In theory, it should yield a higher quality result than a semi transparent paint alone.  However, any surface coating of pigment in a binder seems like an insult to high quality wood.  Wait a tick ,,,, given the quality of the wood species provided in most mass market kits, an obscuring surface stain would be an improvement there.  

It is to scream in frustration!  The use of jargon with this causes confusion about which agents to use.
A stain - the noun - applies to a semi transparent paint. It does not penetrate wood. It sits on the surface.  It is largish pigment particles in a binder.
A dye - is near single molecule pigment.  It actually enters into the wood and becomes part of it. As commonly found, the pigment is either dissolved in water or alcohol.
The water based version penetrates more deeply but also can swell surface wood fibers (raise the grain).
The alcohol based version penetrates not as deep, but does not affect the wood surface.
 
Small boxwood blocks  - depth of penetration is not something that can be seen, so alcohol is probably the more efficient version.
If you buy a small quantity of red and black dye.  An endless variety of shades of brown is possible by adjusting the relative ration of the two solutions.
Even more variety is possible if a brown pigment is in the mix.  In any case, a little black goes a long way.
Test on scrap.  This is both more tricky than is first imagined and messy - gloves - skin will dye too and it takes a few days for dyed cells to be shed.
Once you have the desired shade, the intensity can be less by adding more alcohol.
To finish, use a coat of clear shellac on the dyed blocks.
 
Or you could leap to the final stage by doing what the original Navy Board modelers did.  Use garnet color shellac on the raw boxwood.  First coat, 1/2 strength, second coat full strength.

Jaager,  I think you missed a little bit.  Considering the open grained walnut, --in many, not all, kits ---not even an obscuring surface stain will fix that problem.   Any  close grained wood would really be a huge help.   Cost of course is a factor, but there has to be better choices for the same price  or a price that is reasonably close.
Allan

Based on the necessary mechanisms, to support a claim that their product can penetrate, at least part of the formulation would need to be a dye as well as larger pigment particles that intercalate with a surface polymerized binder.  In theory, it should yield a higher quality result than a semi transparent paint alone.  However, any surface coating of pigment in a binder seems like an insult to high quality wood.  Wait a tick ,,,, given the quality of the wood species provided in most mass market kits, an obscuring surface stain would be an improvement there.  

Thanks for the scream, jaager, and for the interesting thoughts about mixing dyes and about shellac. I hadn't thought of those, and I have a good stock of shellac which I make up myself with spirit. I did know about the difference between dyes and stains but my thoughts just made a slip while writing too quickly. So I hope you can forgive my senile moment.
 
Thanks also for mentioning the beautiful old colour of the boxwood, Allan. I too love the colour and would prefer to use it as is. It's just with 2mm blocks and below I find it hard to use pear and the lighter colour of the boxwood looks a bit odd to me when I look at contemporary models. In fact I might continue without trying to alter the colour. I also have a stock of India ink for the wales, but that won't be for the boxwood.
 
Roger: you put the thought of castello into my head. I have a large chunk of that, so I might try making small blocks with that.
 
Gregory: thanks for the experience with Chuck's blocks, as that seems to be good evidence.
 
Mike: thanks for the comparison between water- and spirit-based Liberon. I had tried the spirit-based on some lime and had the same experience. So I'll try water-based in future.
 
Anyway, a very stimulating set of thoughts for me to use as I ponder!
 
Tony

Jaager,
 
Thanks for your clarification.  My post was intended to introduce Neophytes to the mysteries of ship drafting and was based general principals.  My Naval Architecture education occurred in the early ‘60s, prior to the dawn of CADD.  We were still required to manually make a lines drawing from a table of offsets with the finished drawing India ink on vellum.  What a mess!  The ship in question had a steel hull and if lines drawing sections were a multiple of frame spacing we had no way of knowing.
 
I certainly agree that there were many framing conventions in the wooden ship era most of which were certainly connected to construction techniques, a subject usually ignored.  I agree that many ships were built by lofting a minimum number of frames and then adding filler frames between, all dubbed to produce a fair hull.
 
This may account for differences in performance of sister ships built to the same lines.

It is to scream in frustration!  The use of jargon with this causes confusion about which agents to use.
A stain - the noun - applies to a semi transparent paint. It does not penetrate wood. It sits on the surface.  It is largish pigment particles in a binder.
A dye - is near single molecule pigment.  It actually enters into the wood and becomes part of it. As commonly found, the pigment is either dissolved in water or alcohol.
The water based version penetrates more deeply but also can swell surface wood fibers (raise the grain).
The alcohol based version penetrates not as deep, but does not affect the wood surface.
 
Small boxwood blocks  - depth of penetration is not something that can be seen, so alcohol is probably the more efficient version.
If you buy a small quantity of red and black dye.  An endless variety of shades of brown is possible by adjusting the relative ration of the two solutions.
Even more variety is possible if a brown pigment is in the mix.  In any case, a little black goes a long way.
Test on scrap.  This is both more tricky than is first imagined and messy - gloves - skin will dye too and it takes a few days for dyed cells to be shed.
Once you have the desired shade, the intensity can be less by adding more alcohol.
To finish, use a coat of clear shellac on the dyed blocks.
 
Or you could leap to the final stage by doing what the original Navy Board modelers did.  Use garnet color shellac on the raw boxwood.  First coat, 1/2 strength, second coat full strength.

It is to scream in frustration!  The use of jargon with this causes confusion about which agents to use.
A stain - the noun - applies to a semi transparent paint. It does not penetrate wood. It sits on the surface.  It is largish pigment particles in a binder.
A dye - is near single molecule pigment.  It actually enters into the wood and becomes part of it. As commonly found, the pigment is either dissolved in water or alcohol.
The water based version penetrates more deeply but also can swell surface wood fibers (raise the grain).
The alcohol based version penetrates not as deep, but does not affect the wood surface.
 
Small boxwood blocks  - depth of penetration is not something that can be seen, so alcohol is probably the more efficient version.
If you buy a small quantity of red and black dye.  An endless variety of shades of brown is possible by adjusting the relative ration of the two solutions.
Even more variety is possible if a brown pigment is in the mix.  In any case, a little black goes a long way.
Test on scrap.  This is both more tricky than is first imagined and messy - gloves - skin will dye too and it takes a few days for dyed cells to be shed.
Once you have the desired shade, the intensity can be less by adding more alcohol.
To finish, use a coat of clear shellac on the dyed blocks.
 
Or you could leap to the final stage by doing what the original Navy Board modelers did.  Use garnet color shellac on the raw boxwood.  First coat, 1/2 strength, second coat full strength.

From your comments, it appears that you have a misconception about what it is that his being described.
Deadflat does mean flat.  It is about understanding what it is that is flat. 
At the midship - generally this is the frames about 40% of the distance from the FP.  Almost never is the midship half the distance along the length.
If a plank is placed against the outer face the frames here, it is parallel with the keel.  There is no bevel, so it is flat.  Beveling is tricky and bothersome to do, so it gained an accolade "deadflat: instead of just "flat".
 
In old shell first hulls and early frame first hulls, the first inside reinforcement  timber across the keel defined the inside bottom. If they were close enough together to walk on or had boards placed across them, they were the floor.
 
If the inside of the frame timbers are covered with planking, this serves to seal the inside of the hull.  It is a sealing.  No Webster's or Oxford and imprecise spelling  becomes ceiling.  If you think on it, the layer of material fixed to the underside of the beams for the floor above a room does sort of seal it also.

Roger,
I have a definite bias about this, but in all of my observations, I find that the stations more than match frame locations. They define them.
In every instance that I have encountered, a station line is the midline of a bend (paired frames). 
For POF framing of a model, where the lofting methods in current general use is employed, the stations are all but useless. This is certainly the case if a bend is glued up before a pattern is mounted then final shaping is done.  This certainly an incentive to discount the importance of stations
 
I see that there was a major change in framing and lofting after about 1860.  Most of the books that we reference about lofting and framing were written after this change occurred. Most were published near or after 1900.   Iron and steel require a different level of precision than does wood.  After 1860 iron and steel quickly began to rule.  The old shipwrights who knew the old methods were no more.  The methods required to shape and iron or steel frame had "infected" those who built using wood.  At least those in the major industrial yards that influenced the book authors. 
 
My proposed explanation for how it was most often done, before 1860::
It is my thesis that lofting was more of a guideline.  On the loft floor, what was enlarged to full size and used to produce the frame patterns was only the stations.
For the midship bend, the pattern could be used to define the complete bend since both frames had no bevel.  At the other stations only the down bevel frame was cut and erected.  The actual bevel was cut on the ways using battens resting on each station as a guide.  Once that was satisfactory, the up bevel frames were shaped using the same patterns and the eye of the experienced shipwrights. The intervening bends and (pretty much only in England) the single filling frames were preliminarily (rough) shaped on the ground and then finished on the ways using the battens.
 
There was a note on one of HIC plans for a class of USN warships where the sisters were being built at different east coast yards. The frames patterns were to be made by the loft team at the lead yard and shipped to the other yards along with the plans.   Patterns for 12-20 stations is much more practical to ship than 120-200 patterns representing both faces of every frame.
 
With my first POF hull (Kate Cory - Hahn style), I came to really dislike point plot lofting.  I found that getting a curve to connect the plotted points was error prone and inconsistent  from frame to frame.  For me, the Hahn method  (forming a glued up frame horse shoe of wide timber planks and fixing a pattern)  involves an unacceptable amount of waste of expensive wood.  After a long search and several false trails, I developed a new way.  The timbers are shaped as individuals, but include the bevels on both faces.  There is also some extra needed for alignment of the stack of frames between each pair of stations.  The spaces have temporary wood filling them.  The space wood is cheap Pine and it is held by a bond that is easily released.  The Old Boys would have used low cost and rectangular chocks to fill part of the spaces.   My method of frame assembly that only needs the already existing stations to define my frame shapes.  The logic of this process as probably being similar to actual practice became clear to me.   I thought/think that those Old Boys, for whom time and effort was vital,  would not miss the reduced time and expense that this way of doing it represents.  I have an additional advantage over the batten guide method.  Because the pattern is already on each timber,  I can position a pattern with both stations on it in precise alignment on both faces of the stack of frames.  The bevel for both faces is precisely in place.  I can shape the stack off the hull as a unit.   This is much easier and less error prone in lofting than the ca 1900 published methods. 

From your comments, it appears that you have a misconception about what it is that his being described.
Deadflat does mean flat.  It is about understanding what it is that is flat. 
At the midship - generally this is the frames about 40% of the distance from the FP.  Almost never is the midship half the distance along the length.
If a plank is placed against the outer face the frames here, it is parallel with the keel.  There is no bevel, so it is flat.  Beveling is tricky and bothersome to do, so it gained an accolade "deadflat: instead of just "flat".
 
In old shell first hulls and early frame first hulls, the first inside reinforcement  timber across the keel defined the inside bottom. If they were close enough together to walk on or had boards placed across them, they were the floor.
 
If the inside of the frame timbers are covered with planking, this serves to seal the inside of the hull.  It is a sealing.  No Webster's or Oxford and imprecise spelling  becomes ceiling.  If you think on it, the layer of material fixed to the underside of the beams for the floor above a room does sort of seal it also.

From the point of view of a home sawyer and saw miller, much time is involved in getting water out of wood and getting it equilibrate with atmospheric water concentration.  Soaking a plank is undoing all that, if you even could get water deep into the interior.  The natural glue that holds wood fiber together is not soluble in water in any case.  It is heat that loosens the bond enough to allow the fibers to slide as individuals and then rebond when the heat as dissipated,  Steam is more efficient than air at heat transfer. The hotter the steam the faster is the transfer.  Liquid water does not exceed 100 degrees.  It is probably a bad thing to actually cook the wood.
 
There are more than a few threads here concerning the various methods and devices used to bend planking.
 

If it is Butapren (which I think it is), than its equivalent in the US is contact cement.
Butapren also stinks fiercely, so I wouldn't use it for shipmodeling...

From the point of view of a home sawyer and saw miller, much time is involved in getting water out of wood and getting it equilibrate with atmospheric water concentration.  Soaking a plank is undoing all that, if you even could get water deep into the interior.  The natural glue that holds wood fiber together is not soluble in water in any case.  It is heat that loosens the bond enough to allow the fibers to slide as individuals and then rebond when the heat as dissipated,  Steam is more efficient than air at heat transfer. The hotter the steam the faster is the transfer.  Liquid water does not exceed 100 degrees.  It is probably a bad thing to actually cook the wood.
 
There are more than a few threads here concerning the various methods and devices used to bend planking.
 

This inspired me to investigate my archives.  For a time, I explored building a model of HMS Prince 1670.
This was at a time when I was teaching myself some skills on the drawing board, so no wood was ever in danger.
 
My first step is to gather up as much information as I can find.
 
Long ago, I bought:
A set of 1:48 lines plans of the ship (model?), I think it is  from the Science Museum.  It is a really large photograph - on two sheets.
A set of 1:96  plans ID'ed with CM (Clive Millward?).
A folder of model plans 1:60  (POB - ugh) in Italian  Teconmodel .
I think I have a series of photos of the Science Museum model - probably from their museum shop.
 
At the time, I was working thru the design exercises in Deane's Doctrine.  This made me aware of "touch" as relates to keel and ship length.
Touch is what the dimensions in tables from the time list as the length of the ship.  It is ~20% shorter than the length on the gun deck.
I was corresponding with someone who was building a kit of HMS Prince. He was having trouble getting the deck gear placed.  It turns out that the designer of his kit confused touch with LBP. The hull was too short.  It could have been rescued early on by patching in an additional section of spine at the dead flat and duplicating or triplicating the midship mould.   
 
For your kit plans, it would be prudent to verify that the length of the hull is correct.
 
A first rate 17th century floating palace is about as daunting a challenge as it gets for a ship model.  If you are determined to forge ahead, but wish your first scratch project to have sufficient documentation and plans,  ANCRE has a recent monograph of a French 17th first rate that is both elegant and magnificent.  It is St. Philippe.  But a really challenging aspect is that all of the frames are canted forward between 1 and 2 degrees.
 

From the point of view of a home sawyer and saw miller, much time is involved in getting water out of wood and getting it equilibrate with atmospheric water concentration.  Soaking a plank is undoing all that, if you even could get water deep into the interior.  The natural glue that holds wood fiber together is not soluble in water in any case.  It is heat that loosens the bond enough to allow the fibers to slide as individuals and then rebond when the heat as dissipated,  Steam is more efficient than air at heat transfer. The hotter the steam the faster is the transfer.  Liquid water does not exceed 100 degrees.  It is probably a bad thing to actually cook the wood.
 
There are more than a few threads here concerning the various methods and devices used to bend planking.